Most of the time, I’m not sorry that all my dedicated, single-use devices are dead and gone. If you’re carrying a modern smartphone around, why would you miss your Discman, or your portable DVD player, or your dumbphone, or your tape recorder, or your point-and-shoot camera, or your PalmPilot? Not only can one device replace all of them, but that one device is usually better at all of that stuff than most dedicated devices ever were.
Yet there’s something pure about hardware that’s only designed to do one thing, at least when it’s designed well. A gadget that only wants to do a couple of things can tailor itself better to those specific uses while ignoring everything else. Maybe you could get better battery life out of your camera if it didn’t need to be a portable game console and full-featured computer all wrapped up into one....
The Kindle Voyage is the Chromebook Pixel of e-readers. It’s undeniably great hardware, the best in its class and far superior to its older, cheaper cousins. Its screen is good; its backlight works exactly as advertised. It’s just that it’s almost twice as expensive as pretty good hardware that does most of the same stuff. It’s for True Believers for whom price is an afterthought rather than a deciding factor.
If that describes you, you’ll really like the Voyage. It’s attractive and understated, and it retains and improves upon all of the good stuff from other Kindles. It’s just that a dedicated e-reader at this price is the king of a very small hill.
Review: Amazon’s Kindle Voyage e-reader is the king of its niche | Ars Technica
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